ELECTRONIC TEXT WORKING GROUP: LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE

Ross Coleman - Facilitator

What counts as a text?

Anything encoded in a character set.

Features of Electronic Text and Major Issues

  • need to ensure long-term preservation both of original document AND also of a copy in a computer-usable format
  • Austlii warned of difficulty of getting anything in any kind of electronic form - can't assume that you'll start with a good electronic basis
  • desirability of uniform codes/standards... BUT
  • we are "always working provisionally and pragmatically" - we can't make sense to think in terms of lasting a month, a year.
  • best practice guidelines can be helpful, and are achievable, but can't be enforced
  • text not isolable from the other modalities
  • identify commonalities of needs

Our Current Knowledge

The range of activities represented in the workshop group gives fairly good coverage of the disciplines represented within the Humanities brief of the ARC HCA panel, which covers humanities and law and architecture.

Some perceived gaps in the workshop group:

  • classicists
  • computational linguists
  • scholars in languages other than English

Needs

  • communication and information sharing
  • critical mass at national context under the umbrella of such a network seems important (since people are often working within a relatively small community of advice)
  • prototypes: e.g. Austlii's advice to its south African counterpart - if you are going to do X these are some of things that will be useful to do

Training

Various levels:

  • workshops
  • specialist advice through funding fellowships, or residencies for people, so they could absorb and test
  • consultancy by members of the network
  • identify specialist skills
  • recognition of status of digital research

    		•

    Stocktake

    • identify existing activities
    • Academy of Humanities as institutional focus for international linkages (problem: it may not have the expertise, or not enough, within its present ranks)
    • critical mass for funding
    • information sharing in local community
    • Australian content (define against international networks – why do we have our own?)
    • cross fertilisation of research within disciplines
    • enable projects, not fund them
    • international linkages